updated 10:20 am EDT, Wed March 16, 2011

Geotagging added to field options

FileMaker has announced Bento 4, an update of the company's personal-level database software. Several significant upgrades have been made, most notably the ability to export data alongside templates, meaning that pre-populated databases can finally be loaded by other Bento users. When creating a database, people can now assign geotagging to data through a location field type.

Printing has been expanded to introduce labels for purposes such as mailing, badges and inventory. An assortment of new printing options is designed to improve the appearance of forms such as invoices and sales orders. FileMaker has also made overall performance improvements, and tweaks to the Table and Form views, such as the addition of a Lock option to prevent further changes.

Bento 4 is typically $50, and for the first time in the software's history debuting on the Mac App Store. It can also be bought through the FileMaker website, where a $20 upgrade rebate is available for people who already own a previous version of Bento. Users of the Bento iPhone or iPad apps are warned to update them to v1.1.1, which adds support for Bento 4 as well as voice memos, multitasking, printing PDFs and disabling Address Book and iCal Tasks sync. Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish localizations have been incorporated.

As an aside...

This illustrates a problem with Apple's App Store. The inability to upgrade current versions of software at discounted pricing is restrictive and unappealing. It means the developer must choose either to release updates/upgrades as free (a hit to them) or as "new" software, thus charging full price for the newest release (a hit to consumers).

Other than the convenience of a central online store, there's little incentive for me to seek purchasing my software through the App Store.

Cutesy

Bento 4 may be real cute with nice user-friendly interface; But this interface would be a lot more useful to the OS X Address Book. Because, having in a DataBase where the phone cannot access from it is not as useful as it is implied. Placing these same functionalities within Address Book in terms of Mailing Labels, Mail Merge, Invitation List, just to name a few function seem to make a lot more sense to me. Let's face it, Address Book has not seen much of an improvement at all since its release...